Well I was using Arch, Gentoo, Arch, then Gentoo for the longest time, but cca five months back I switch to Ubuntu for cca 3 months (don't ask why ), then Arch again...but I am back. I don't think this is so much about Arch. I think this is about every package distro. It has just limitations. So that's why I am back and have everything exactly how I want and I have soft versions I want That's why Gentoo wins for me. But against Arch the Gentoo has one weak point... I was able to find almost everything in AUR. Software hinterland is awesome with Arch. I know Gentoo have overlays where is possible to find anything more, but there are sometimes other packages mixing with gentoo ones so this can be problematic...or I can take the ebuild from overlay to local overlay to manage it by myself. But both ways are worse than AUR.

AFIAK you can mask a whole overlay with */*::overlayname and then just unmask the specific packages you want as per normal. Don't hold me to it working or being the exact way - I prefer the local overlay approach since I only need extras for testing purposes.

Yeah, you are certainly correct about that of course, I just assumed form his description; "[...]there are sometimes other packages mixing with gentoo ones[...]"; that he was perhaps using one of the more general overlays with random things in. I should have been more specific .

Everyone in the every other forum always said how hard it was to build gentoo from sources and one has to do it all weekend.
But didn't realize why gentoo is made this way. But then I had to find out that gentoo with gnome 2 DE with all the apps built took only 4 hours in my Lenovo Y580.
That was surprising.

Is it just me or everyone else, where even the video playing consumes less CPU usage in Gentoo than other distros?

Gentoo really have zillion options for every package which is a bit annoying.

Performance wise its as good or better than Debian.

Last edited by hadrons123 on Sun Jun 30, 2013 2:27 am; edited 1 time in total

that may work with some custom user overlay, but it's likely to fail with project overlays, e.g. The haskell overlay.

I don't think so. I employ that strategy with sunrise as well as several other overlays at one point. The only flaw is that some dependencies may need to come along for the unmaking ride._________________First things first, but not necessarily in that order.

My relationship with Arch is two-fold. The good things about Arch is it is extremely easy to install. You can find pacman in Portage and can create a chroot environment in less than 15 minutes. It's easier to use than Debian's debootstrap. Arch's simplicity is so nice when coming from other distributions.

The downside is... upgrading is scary. The Arch dev's have no problem breaking things (for the greater good, mind), and you have to read the news constantly before you upgrade. That's my main problem with Arch. I wish they would implement something similar to Portage's "eselect news" feature.

Arch Linux has one simple theme in mind. update the packge no matter what. Sometimes they hold a new kernel release for couple of weeks but not more than that. But some how I managed to have Arch without any major issues for many months. gentoo feels very comfortable to have stable and testing package with a real definition and understanding of the both terms.

I switched to Gentoo very recently from Arch after probably about a year and a half of it and before arch I was a slackware user for probably the same amount of time. I am so far loving Gentoo, I love the rolling-release style updating but it seems a lot more stable than Arch was, with Arch updates would constantly cause my system to not boot and with Gentoo I've gotten used to things I never had to get used to before such as compiling my kernel.

Also, although Arch is well documented I don't think it's as well documented as Gentoo seems to be. I still like Arch but I don't see me switching back anytime soon.

I'm using Arch right now. I just fancied a change/got lazy. I was 3 or 4 kernel updates behind on my gentoo box, and just thought it'd be nice if it upgraded automatically for a while.

The boot/shutdown process on Arch is lightening quick by the way Binary packaging is obviously fast, although not a big benefit as I usually complile while doing something else anyway. My wifi is pathetically slow in Arch and it refuses to connect automatically at boot, despite being all setup correctly according to their wiki. GRUB2 isn't akin to their KISS philosophy imho.

Like others have said, I'll probably run Arch until it breaks and then come back to Gentoo. The main thing I find with Arch is when things do break the instructions aren't as concise as they are from Gentoo quarters. I usually misunderstand what I am being asked to do and royally screw things up.

See you soon _________________

Quote:

"We migrated key functions from Windows to Linux because we needed an operating system that was stable and reliable" - United Space Alliance, which manages the computer systems for the International Space Station (ISS).

I used Arch for about 2 years until a couple of months ago. When I accidentally wiped my drive (thank heavens for regular backups), I had already been thinking of trying another distro. I'd got to the point where I wasn't learning anything more about Arch, and also realising that I'd learned about Arch, not so much about Linux. I never really had any big problems with Arch, but I'd grown dissatisfied with it. I didn't like systemd (whatever philosophical issues there are, I simply found it difficult and unintuitive to use and configure, and also quite unreliable), and the attitude of at least some of the devs leaves a lot to be desired.

I've been using Slackware since then, and I really appreciate its stability and how vanilla it is, but, as a pre-fab binary distro, it has a similar problem to Arch: after a certain point, you don't learn much. With Slackware, you get almost everything installed at the start, so you don't have any clue how a system is built up; similarly, with Arch, most of the work of configuring stuff is done for you already, so you just tell pacman what packages you want and let it install a whole bunch of dependencies. I always had hundreds of packages that I didn't remember installing and had no idea what they were there for. At least with Slackware, anything new I install, I have to sort out dependencies myself and install them manually, but that's only after a fully functional system is installed.

I really liked what I originally perceived as the minimalism of Arch, though after a couple of years I had realised it wasn't actually all that minimal. I'd always been conscious of the existence of Gentoo, so now's the time to try it. There don't seem to be all that many minimal or meta-distributions out there What I learned during the time I used Arch and even (perhaps more so) the brief time in Slackware has made me confident enough to try Gentoo. I like the idea of having fine-grained control over everything I install, and not having to use systemd.

I'm posting from Slackware now; I've got a basic Gentoo system installed, and the next step is to get X installed, with the help of the excellent Gentoo wiki guide!

I never really had any big problems with Arch, but I'd grown dissatisfied with it. I didn't like systemd (..., I simply found it difficult and unintuitive to use and configure, and also quite unreliable)

Astonishingly I never had problems with Systemd at Gentoo. I ever thought of trying Arch, if Systemd is victim of a hate crime at Gentoo. People talked like that.
I wonder how Arch devs can make Systemd difficult and unintuitive?_________________fun2gen2

Astonishingly I never had problems with Systemd at Gentoo. I ever thought of trying Arch, if Systemd is victim of a hate crime at Gentoo. People talked like that.
I wonder how Arch devs can make Systemd difficult and unintuitive?

It's possible (I'm not saying this is the case; just one possibility) that Arch adopted systemd and forced it on their entire user-base too early or with insufficient care. The devs seem to have a bit of a history of implementing big changes in ways that are extremely disruptive for large numbers of users._________________github

It's possible (I'm not saying this is the case; just one possibility) that Arch adopted systemd and forced it on their entire user-base too early or with insufficient care. The devs seem to have a bit of a history of implementing big changes in ways that are extremely disruptive for large numbers of users.

Systemd in Arch has been brewing for more than 2 years before they made the switch (here's the brewing thread: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=96316). If you find it difficult and unintuitive (I wouldn't call it that, but I would call it complex and especially *different*, very different), that's systemd itself, not something Arch devs did.

Last edited by Gusar on Fri Jul 19, 2013 4:29 pm; edited 1 time in total

@ibrunton, "extremely disruptive"
I remember having tried Arch some six years ago and having had to massivly change the system by hand after an upgrade: I thought such a thing should not called rolling of a release and turned to my Debian~unstable back then. There is the other extreme: Dev had promised a newer than systemd-44 for months. But is working heavily on sysvinit to get the precondition for a smooth transition to systemd-2xy.

Systemd-44 is working smoothly for Debian-stable. But using a sysvinit-compat layer is what I call unintuitive: hundreds of old sysvinit-scripts are used in parallel and you really can't see what effect is coming from where._________________fun2gen2

Systemd in Arch has been brewing for more than 2 years before they made the switch (here's the brewing thread: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=96316). If you find it difficult and unintuitive (I wouldn't call it that, but I would call it complex and especially *different*, very different), that's systemd itself, not something Arch devs did.

Yes, my suspicion was always that it was a systemd issue, not Arch.

Difficult and unintuitive could be overcome, but I found systemd pretty buggy, too, even after a completely fresh installation of Arch. Services would start and then quit randomly. Or not start at all. Maybe something about my hardware or software spooked it. Obviously other people have found it useful, but I certainly wasn't inspired. I prefer the init scripts approach, so I'll just use distros and systems that let me do that. Luckily, Linux offers lots of choice._________________github

FWIW I never had any problems with systemd at all with Arch and Fedora. But the story they preach at Arch as being minimalistic is total bull. The memory foot print in Arch and Fedora is almost the same with same apps. But if you you take Debian its a total different story.

The memory foot print in Arch and Fedora is almost the same with same apps.

Of course it's the same. How can you expect the same apps to have different resource usage? If an app is a monster, it'll be a monster on any distro. Arch's lightness comes from it's install procedure - the install gives you a minimal system that you then expand with what you want. (of course Arch isn't unique with that, Gentoo is the same, as is a Debian netinstall, and I'm sure there's more such distros).

Fedora on the other hand, installs a whole bunch of stuff by default. Stuff I didn't even know existed. Like auditd. Do you know what that even is and what it's used for? I don't. Well, Fedora installs and runs it by default. There's a few more things like that.
Another example, the Fedora LXDE spin - it's a mix of gtk2 and gtk3 apps. That'll naturally have a higher resource footprint than a pure gtk2 environment would have.

Arch is as light as you make it. If you install monster apps, Arch can't suddenly make them more minimal. Hmm, wait, I just read your post again - are you claiming Debian does have a smaller footprint using the exact same apps? Disk footprint I get, Arch installs headers and other dev stuff by default, whereas Debian splits those into separate -dev packages, so Debian's disk footprint for the same apps will be smaller. But resource usage (RAM and CPU)?

The memory foot print in Arch and Fedora is almost the same with same apps.

Of course it's the same. How can you expect the same apps to have different resource usage? ...

Hmm, wait, I just read your post again - are you claiming Debian does have a smaller footprint using the exact same apps? Disk footprint I get, Arch installs headers and other dev stuff by default, whereas Debian splits those into separate -dev packages, so Debian's disk footprint for the same apps will be smaller. But resource usage (RAM and CPU)?

Yes he meant smaller memory footprint. Most programs have optional features at configuration time. If all options are turned on, as they often are with binary distros, then the added code, plus libraries may indeed lead to greater memory usage on many systems, but minimal (debian), or configurable source-based distros (gentoo, LFS) will usually use less. For me, a default gnome install on Ubuntu ran 480 MBs memory usage after login. With same services and programs on gentoo, I used 270ish MBs post login. I later reduced it to 168 MB after removing cruft I didn't want or need. Some programs like OpenOffice and Firefox saw memory reduction of 50% with some features turned off at compile time.